How do you ensure that your leadership team embodies and models the desired behaviors and culture you want to cultivate?

By Sh. Anil Kumar Jadli, Director (HR), NTPC Limited

NTPC, a sustainable energy leader in India, is proactively managing India’s energy transition equitably and effectively. As India’s largest power producer, NTPC is playing a central role in India’s growth story by lighting up people’s lives and electrifying economic activity in the country.

Over the past  49 years, NTPC has had a glorious journey, and if we have to summarize this journey in a few words, it has to be the “Can Do Spirit” of NTPC which has acted as a catalyst in its transformation from a thermal power generator to establishing itself as the dominant power major with presence across the entire value chain of the power generation business.

Commensurate with India’s growth challenges, NTPC has embarked upon an ambitious plan to attain a total installed capacity of 130000 MW by the year 2032. NTPC is also venturing into other spaces such as renewables, pump storage, nuclear, green hydrogen etc., and has an ambitious plan of renewable capacity addition of 60 GW by 2032. In order to actualize its Vision of becoming the World’s leading power company, energizing India’s growth, it needs leaders who can thrive amidst the complexity that comes with new growth opportunities. To lead the energy transition and to make our dominance across the entire value chain of energy, we need to promote a culture of performance, agility, mobility, and safety. We are also creating an ecosystem, where employees are excited to take up challenging assignments and embrace changes. Our L&D intervention is focused on making our workforce future-ready.

In order to institutionalize the Culture of Safety, Performance, Agility and Mobility, we have aligned our career development scheme, which defines qualifying requirements and desirable competencies for assuming higher responsibility. Also. There are various mid-career interventions such as the Planned Intervention program, job rotation, 10X program for potential future leaders, and Harvard Management Mentor as part of leadership development and succession planning.

NTPC firmly believes that the foundation of a thriving organization lies in the health and vitality of its workforce. This is why, through its “People before PLF (Plant Load Factor)” approach, NTPC prioritizes the well-being of its employees considering them essential to its growth and success.

Leaders across NTPC encourage and create an  enabling working environment that promotes inclusiveness, diversity and equity.  They instill the confidence among employees that  “NTPC would stand by them” during the significant milestones in their lives and therefore organizational commitment among NTPCians is very high.

NTPC has focused in a big way on the People Managers as they have an important role in creating a culture of performance, fairness and psychological safety.  Continuous efforts are made for sensitizing Team Leaders about their role along with equipping them with skills to conduct comprehensive Performance and Career dialogues and build trust at the workplace.

In our journey, our Core Values (Integrity, Customer Focus, Organizational Pride, Mutual Respect & Trust, Innovation and Learning, Total Quality and Safety) have held us in good stead. Leaders in NTPC nurture the core values, translate and clearly demonstrate these into desired actions and behaviours. In order to institutionalize these core values, we have taken various steps, like conduct of training programmes on values and including sessions on values in our key programmes, rewarding value-based behaviour, creation of Value Actualisation Task force, Core Value Champions, etc. NTPC conducts third-party Online CPV (Executive/Managerial Competencies, Potential Competencies, Core Values) Assessments through which the assessment of actualization of the Core Values amongst the Employees is done, which carries weightage in career growth of employees.

NTPC also conducts the process of 360 Degree Feedback for all its People Managers in which the Questionnaire is based on the Core Values and Leadership Attributes (Ownership, Speed, Empowerment / Risk Taking, Growth) of NTPC. This process facilitates the participants to gather confidential and anonymous feedback from their stakeholders about how they are displaying the Core Values/Leadership Attributes.

Further, in order to develop ‘micro-habits’ in support of the actualization of the Leadership Attributes, special prompts have been introduced in the Performance Management System wherein the Employees have to provide the details of the demonstrated behavior in respect of the leadership attributes.

To uphold high ethical standards, NTPC has implemented various initiatives (like Integrity Pact, training in anti-corruption policies/procedures, Code of Conduct, Vigilance Clearance for career growth, etc.) designed to foster transparency, accountability, and responsibility in the workforce, reinforcing our dedication to maintaining an ethical work environment.

There are various formal and informal channels available in the organization where leaders stay connected with the employees and, which helps us to create a culture of openness and trust.